Language and languages, mostly but not always about English

24/12/2014

Why Christmas

The other day I went to a carol concert here in Barcelona. It finished with White Christmas – or it should have, but this is what we got:

I'm dreaming of a why Christmas With every Christmas card I wry May your days be merry and brigh And may all your Christmases be why.

It’s the final-consonant problem of course. Native English choirs pride themselves on all hitting the sound at the same instant. However, Catalan does have words that end with t, unlike Spanish, which has no words ending with the airway obstructed or the mouth closed.

Or so I thought till I went to YouTube and found that Bing Crosby misses the t’s too.

So what? Happy Christmas to those who celebrate it, and enjoy yourselves anyway to those who don’t.

I have been otherwise occupied in the last few months. I hope to resume normal service in the New Year.

Spanish […] has no words ending with the airway obstructed or the mouth closed.

It's true that unvoiced obstruents in word coda position were lost or lenited in Old Spanish, but there's a goodish number of well-established cultisms and borrowings that have them: cénit, acimut (from Arabic), déficit, superávit, plácet (from Latin), carnet, vermut (from French), robot (from Czech), etc.